Rupal Oza’s hard-hitting book Semiotics of Rape goes where many do not dare to go. Haryana, to begin with, the Wild West in public imagination, an outpost of a violent, vengeful patriarchy with sinking sex ratios and recurrent tension between Jats and Dalits. A State that simmers and boils, and roils into the news routinely over Jat reservation, caste violence, honour killings and gang rapes.
Yet, Haryana has also seen much activity in the last decade to counter this image, with State incentives to promote girls’ education (made free till post-graduation), 50% reservation in Panchayats, cash transfer schemes, a helpline and special police services for women. Community-led NGOs and women’s groups in the NCR region have also set up interventions on gender equality and empowerment.
In many ways, it is a perfect storm for Oza’s enquiry into the ‘social life of rape’. Oza, a Professor of Women and Gender studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, takes us into rural Haryana to follow eight rape cases in the period 2015 to 2017 to understand what happens when a rape charge takes place.
In the cases Oza investigates, most victims or survivors are Dalit young women, and the accused are Jat or OBC, all powerful members of the rural community. Beyond the act of violation, the rape charge in this context is a theatrical production in itself, connected to deeper questions of political economy: caste, land and gender politics.
Across four spatial registers or ‘scales’ as used by feminist geographers, Oza identifies ‘scripts’ created by years of ‘sedimented narratives’, ‘rehearsed’ every time a case arises. These scales, from the ‘most bureaucratic to the most intimate’ (p. 102) are: district, village, basti (neighbourhood), home. First are the official spaces such as the police stations and district courts where the discourse is set. Here, Oza repeatedly encounters the view that ‘90% of rape cases are false cases’ (of elopement), and end in ‘compromise’ with an exchange of money motivated by caste groups (Dalits and OBCs) who are seen as unreliable and fickle in their pursuit of justice.
Next is at the level of the village, where performances of compromise or out of court settlements take place publicly. Compromise is illegal in criminal cases like rape, but are still common. Mediated by Panchayats, money exchanges hands (to compensate the survivor’s father for the ‘loss in value’ to his daughter), or agreements are signed on stamped paper. The act of compromise in the village setting before the Panchayat is essential to manage reputational harm to both the people involved and the village, so that news of the case is contained. Often this includes a public apology by the father of the alleged rapist to the father of the girl, as if, ‘the father… is the subject who has been wronged’ (p. 81). Women are often not even present at the spaces where the negotiation takes place.
Zooming in further is the level of the basti where the survivor lives (often a caste-based enclave), also implicated as the cases are bound to questions of community, caste and land.
Finally, there is the level of the woman herself—what the charge means to her, and what justice might mean to her, the nuances that ‘may not be visible at higher resolutions’ (p. 71). This is the one scale I would have liked to read more about.
Over four immersive chapters, Oza unravels for the reader what she is discovering. The first is on consent, where Oza deals directly with the question of ‘false cases’ to understand the complicated stories behind them, through the case of a consensual inter-caste relationship that when discovered becomes framed as a rape case by the family of the woman. A compromise is the only avenue available to the woman to free her ex-lover from criminal action and to mitigate the reputational harm caused to her.
The second chapter is on compromise, a key feature of the resolution of the cases. The third chapter is about land, questions around which Oza finds undergirds all the cases, directly or indirectly. An alarming statistic Oza points to is that Jats comprise 25% of the population in Haryana but own 80% of the land. Dalits and OBCs largely work on Jat lands, and become beholden to them for their livelihood. This adds a critical dimension to why Dalit families are coerced to compromise and withdraw cases, as their survival depends on Jat patronage.
The final and most devastating chapter is on death. Oza writes, ‘cases of rape that are followed by death compel acknowledgement by a state whose primary mode of response to rape has otherwise been disbelief’ (p. 23). When a death occurs because of rape, ‘the matter has become serious’, a local lawyer tells her.
Alongside, the book draws rich connections with global (American) scholarship, for example, with Saidiya Hartman’s work on the capacity of enslaved people to demonstrate autonomy even in conditions of oppression, and Audra Simpson’s work on refusal as an alternative to recognition by indigenous people who refuse to belong to the USA or Canada and insist on the sovereignty of their nation (p. 90).
This book will appeal to a wide interdisciplinary audience, but will also be useful for activists and policy makers. In particular, the fleshing out of concepts such as consent, compromise and scripts on rape (as they play out in different settings) can help the development sector push past the jargon. For example, I found the fact that ‘consent’ is viewed only as evidence of women’s unreliability in testimonies as eye-opening, indicating that much more work by feminist groups is needed to build social recognition of women’s voices. As Oza writes, ‘the perversion of consent in these rape scripts that characterize the consenting woman as unreliable or promiscuous and immoral is in an effort to wrest sexual subjectivity from women back to the home, court, and state’ (p. 47).
The idea of ‘subjectivity’ can help us understand when women make choices that don’t always fit feminist ideas of agency. For example, in one of the cases, a mother whose daughter was gang-raped, refuses to continue with the case despite the activist groups supporting her wanting her to do so. Her reason is clear: the village is where her livelihood and life are. Survival of entire households depends on her refusal. In several other cases, survivors insist on compromise themselves as an expression of what they consider justice.
The scripts seem immutable, and raise the question: how does one change these scripts? Oza notes that work by activists—their body of documents, fact-finding reports, testimonies, fictions—have created the language through which sexual violations can be identified and named, and justice claimed. The very existence of these claims is in itself a change.
Land reforms, women’s land ownership, and judicial intervention (such as the creation of witness protection programmes) may hold the keys to disrupting these scripts in rural Haryana. Oza notes several other disruptions in the acts of refusal, such as in cases where Dalit communities refuse to cremate a body until the case is registered. Even the presence of the feminist researcher like Oza becomes a disruptor, as we see, when a fight breaks out in the home of a survivor who requests her to speak to her parents to let her go to college.
The researcher’s own positionality as a dominant caste scholar comes up often. To the underlying question as to why she does not follow cases of upper caste women, Oza realizes that these cases are quashed or dealt with before arriving at the police station or with activist groups, a finding of concern in itself. In several instances, Oza puts herself in the picture as a relevant actor, such as in a situation where a survivor’s family asks her, with her clear position of privilege, to negotiate (unsuccessfully) with the Panchayat on their behalf to use the compromise money for the survivor’s college education, rather than her marriage.
This spirit of transparency, self-reflection and solidarity for the survivors is reflected throughout the research. This book is a real testament to the power of feminist scholarship: fierce in its own refusal to look away, even at difficult issues like gang rape, false cases or compromise, and committed to revealing what women’s lives are really like.
Manjima Bhattacharjya is a Sociologist based in Mumbai. She is the author of Intimate City (Zubaan, 2021).